


To Dance Like Gossamer

by nahofficial



Category: Dragalia Lost (Video Game)
Genre: because dragalia is all about how the characters interact with one another, so logically i do a subconsciousness character study, various other minor characters
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-10
Updated: 2019-07-09
Packaged: 2020-06-25 16:41:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19749664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nahofficial/pseuds/nahofficial
Summary: Annelie is severely wounded in battle and is bedridden. As she heals she is forced to confront her own subconsciousness. The death of her father, her self-worth, fears of emptiness.A surreal journey through the mind.





	To Dance Like Gossamer

**Author's Note:**

> i made a whole ass outline for this but when i started writing i delved deeper and deeper into what annelie's father mustve been like and her past experiences and made it less about what i thought it was going to be about so i might as well just not have an outline at all. also be ready for imagery & symbolism as a focal point.
> 
> much love to all my friends that i badgered to read this.

The mission was meant to be a simple one. The scouts reported fiends in the forest, nearing a sylvan village. Nothing too out of the ordinary, no truly dangerous creature. Their formation was common, being just a horde moving towards the place where they sensed the most mana. With Euden in the lead, they would surround the fiends, close them off, keep them away from the village. Backup archers would trail behind, making sure none remained. Their strategy was airtight. Exterminate them, assess damages, go home, eat dinner, sleep. Rinse, repeat. Same soup, just reheated.

To Annelie, it was shaping up to be just another dress rehearsal. She looked into her mirror and adjusted the bows on her ears; The performer must always look her best, she thought, even if it’s just to muck about and slay fiends. She was on duty today, and exterminating fiends was the least she could do for Euden as he allowed her circus to stay on the Halidom's grounds. While any other royal might have thought the big top to be garish, Euden didn’t seem to mind a single bit. Perhaps he truly didn’t mind, but it could just as well be a necessary evil for him so as to keep the prowess of Fritz’s dagger work (and to a lesser extent, she thought, her own lancework) on his side of the battlefield. She was grateful that he allowed them residence regardless. A stable place allowed her and her troupe to practice regularly, train well, rest well, and have a base of operations for their circus’ off-seasons. Not a day went by where Annelie’s schedule wasn’t packed to the brim. Between physical training, circus training, solo lessons, financial managing, repairs, spending time with Liger, and errands she did for the Halidom at large, she could hardly find a moment to breathe and think. Just how she liked it.

She reached for the partizan leaning against her dresser. She had been using this lance since she settled at the Halidom. Fritz and Ramona helped her design it to optimize both gracefulness and deadliness. She felt the wound leather grip, now comfortable and familiar in her hand. The ribbons she tied right below the spearhead would blossom out when she swung it to dazzle and distract enemies, but for now they maypoled around the handle. A single twirl would unwind them. She left her room and joined everyone else preparing for the fight down in the great lawn. Above their heads, a flat plain of grey cloud muted all light.

As soon as they entered the forest, Annelie felt that something was off. Ranzal was no longer joking around with Euden and Elisanne, but instead was uncharacteristically quiet. The energy in the forest was strange and depressing. It seemed to permeate like an invisible fog, coming in through the nose and wrapping its tendrils around the heart and lungs, squeezing. Annelie felt like she was walking through spiderwebs. The group moved together cautiously until they could hear the cries of fiends in the distance. Euden signaled everyone to stop as a blue-haired man unfamiliar to Annelie descended from the treetops. The man murmured something to Euden, then disappeared just as quickly as he appeared. After a couple moments of conversation with Ranzal and Elisanne, Euden motioned for everyone to gather around.

“Bad news everyone, though I’m sure you all could already tell,” said Euden quietly, his jaw firm. One of his hands was resting tensely on the hilt of his sword. “Jurota has just informed me that the estimates made by the scouts this morning were severely, severely underestimated. We’re going to have to send out some smaller units that might be able to make quick work of some of the hordes of fiends. Of course, I will be operating in one of these units alongside Ranzal and Elisanne. I do not wish to assign these groups, as I don’t know the danger that we will face. I cannot offer any sort of extra rewards for doing this, other than my undying respect and gratitude. If anyone wishes to volunteer, I think two more groups of three...”

“I will,” Annelie said.

Moments later she was moving through the woods silently with her lovely Fritz and the Sylvan Luca, with the insistent-on-coming-as-well young cleric Estelle trailing shortly behind. The plan was for her and Fritz to clean up the fiends, with Luca providing backup if necessary. Estelle would be there in case of injury. Annelie believed the biggest danger was in a lack of firepower. And that they didn’t know exactly how much they were up against. And that she left Liger at the Halidom. But her grip on her spear was firm, and she trusted Fritz’s knifework implicitly. 

Of course, she didn’t plan on the rain. She should’ve planned on the rain. The clouds above had been a dismal grey, and the air had been heavy at the Halidom. The fiends moved like lightning through the heavy drizzle. Beneath them the ground was muddy. The mud splashed up on Annelie’s outfit. She couldn’t jump around like she was accustomed to. Her footing was unstable. Arrows from Luca flew overhead. Fritz’s knives were hitting their marks even in the rain. There were hordes and hordes of the fiends. More than Annelie had ever seen before. It seemed that for every one she swung her lance through, two more hydra'd out. The field was inundated with these beings, all headed directly towards the four adventurers, the nearest source of life and mana. These fiends were of the ghostly kind. Their soft flesh, covered in robes, pulsated like a wasp’s thorax. They floated erratically and let out a scent of expired durian, burning wire and morning breath. Their eyes were deep and red, only glowing if direct eye contact was made, and currently direct eye contact was being made for Annelie.

She had fallen, slipped. She was lying on the ground, holding her lance up against the fiend that had her pinned. Her hair was mud-caked. She looked into its eyes, seeing details of the fiend’s anatomy that she had never seen before. What she believed to be robes were just extensions of their body, different texture of flesh, similar to leather but darker. Beef jerky. The face was void of any openings, the eyes didn’t even protrude, instead being held behind a thin translucent layer of light grey skin. The eyes glowed red, lighting up the capillaries in front of them. Annelie could see blood move through those small veins, watching them pulse. She struggled, fought back, screamed for help. Horrified. These beings were unnatural. She couldn’t get away from it. She felt the movement of insects in the mud beneath her. Worms and beetles.

“Annelie!” She could hear Fritz cry from somewhere near but not near enough.

“Fritz!” She shouted back, her voice cracking. She heard the wet tearing of flesh (not her own, she felt no pain) and let out a shriek of fear and disgust as she felt something slimy touch her abdomen, right where the ribbons of her dress separated to reveal her skin. She broke eye contact with the fiend to look down and see what it was. The fiend’s chest had opened up entirely, revealing jagged teeth and fangs, a giant open maw. From the mouth dropped a long pointed tongue, which was currently resting on her chest. The mouth dripped fiend blood from all sides, viscous, dark and pungent. She watched as the fiend lowered its chest towards her body. To consume, the fiend had to rip its own body to pieces? A tendon dangled from the opening as blood poured with the texture of molasses out of the severed arteries. 

“Fritz! Please!” She shouted again, weaker but more desperate. She struggled and flailed, trying beyond trying to get away, sobbing. She kicked her legs out, desperately trying to get the fiend to get away from her. One of her legs hit its mark, kicking the roof of the fiend’s mouth. It let out a sound unearthly.

She felt the pain before she saw what happened. Fire, burning, bright, sharp. Needles the size of sunflower stems entering her leg, piercing the bone. She screamed again, loud enough to hurt her own voice. Her leg was caught in the fiend’s maw, one of its teeth sliced through one end and out the other, through her femur. The pain was agonizing. Her stomach churned. Her head grew fuzzy, her spear fell from her hands. Before she passed out, she felt the slicing of the fiend’s claw across her chest, opening up three gashes which stung with hellfire.

Fragments of memories, recollected only through the wedding veils of pain:

Fritz sending a dagger through the skull of the fiend. Her head was light, the world spun, and she emptied her stomach out onto the muddy ground beside her. 

\--

Being carried through the woods. The running hurt her leg with every step.

\--

The feeling of two healing staves being used on her at once. It was nauseating. 

\--

The Halidom.

\--

Fritz crying at her bedside. Was it morning? Evening? Where was she? Foggy. Foggy. Her chest stung.

\--

"Healing… only…. much…" A woman's voice.

\--

Her hand being squeezed.

\--

Flickering lamp at nighttime.

\--

Her head being held up, soup being poured into her mouth. She swallowed subconsciously.

\--

".. Will …. make it…?"

\--

Her hand being squeezed.

\--

Flickering lamp at nighttime.

\--

And then memories more fully emerge, foggy like milk in water. Lozenge shapes of dreams intersperse reality’s filament. It became hard for her to distinguish the real from the constructed. Cotton candy pink clouds and blue skies with white birds airborne filled her vision as she watched Fritz keep himself from collapsing while listening to Cleo talk. Her words were rhinoceroses, charging florally. Pain was a constant hum like a shattered eardrum, the sting of infection. It was in her heart. Her hands held the sheets like the ocean held rivers and the sidewalks held people. 

Her father was a grey-eared sylvan. Her mother was the stage. If men were forests, Annelie’s father was the jungle. Dense and knowledgeable. Ancient but filled with life. Clever, curious, creative. He taught her everything she ever needed to know. His knapsack was filled with books of prose and poetry. He would read to her at night by the light of the fire while his troupe slept. “Face against the panes like a sentinel of sorrow...” The troupe would tell her about his glorious stage performances, his ability to stun and charm. He was too old to perform by the time she came around. The strongman would play his accordion as her father taught her to waltz. The clown and acrobat trained her in their arts, her father would teach her how to run the business of the circus. Sickness was a coward to steal such a great man from her. The fear of weakness stewed in her heart as she watched his life tiptoe away through his eyes on ballerina shoes. 

One morning as she was limp in her bed, being held up and fed lukewarm soup, she felt life brimming beneath her eyelids. Her hands twitched, then her arms. Her whole body was caught in a short spasm as it remembered what it was like to be alive. Her wounds were fires etched into her skin and she let out a choked cry. Her vision became clear and focused and she saw Fritz in equal parts fear and love, his eyes brimming with tears. He let the bowl of soup slip to the floor. 

“Annelie!” He cried, grasping her hand. He knelt at her side. Annelie couldn’t speak, but she smiled. She smiled and squeezed his hand with her feeble strength. “Annelie, you’re alive!”

She nodded. She glanced down at her body and saw that her whole chest was bandages. She didn’t have to see her wounds to know where they were, every single micrometer of those gashes burned and throbbed. She could map out a diagram of the way each laceration looked without even a glance at them. The more she thought about her wounds the more her head spun. She could hear the blood flowing in her head. She only stopped herself from passing out by focusing on Fritz's words as he began to talk. And once he started talking, he didn’t stop. Words beyond words, all piling up in his brain were set loose.

“Annelie, I’ve been so worried,” he said, pressing her hand to his cheek. “You’ve been out for a week now, we’ve all been worrying so badly. Cleo said--oh, Cleo’s been coming by every day to do healing on you. She’s so kind. Anyway, Cleo said that there’s only so much that mana healing can do for you. I don’t understand it, like, isn’t it magic? Shouldn’t they be able to do anything? I don’t get it. I definitely have been freaking out on her. Shit, she must think that I’m some nutcase. She said that your wounds are anti-magic or something. It’s ‘counter-mana’ is what she called it. Fiend evolution. It’s been all she’s been able to do to keep the infections of it from going to your heart. She says that you’re going to be fine eventually and you’re really lucky that so many kind and talented people live in the Halidom.

“I’ve been here every hour I could, just waiting for you to wake up and get back and be back with us. You’ve been in a weird semi-comatose state and I’ve had to take care of you constantly, so once you’re better and healthy again you better take me out for a nice meal, okay?” He managed a smile to her, waited for a response that couldn’t come. “That was a joke, I’m happy you’re alive. I’ve been worrying and worrying and worrying and--look, look at this,” he leans over and shows her his hair. “Look, it’s grey hairs. At least I’m not balding, huh? Who’d want to see a bald twink looking guy on the big top throwing daggers around? Not my style.

“Oh god, Annelie, they were saying that you might not be able to perform for months. Months! What is our troupe going to do about it all? The uh, our performances that is. Sorry, I know you can’t do anything about it and you shouldn’t feel guilty cuz it’s not your fault, but I’ll just be missing you so much out there. At least it’ll all heal and you’ll be able to perform again. Have I ever told you how beautifully you move? I was sitting here worrying that you might think that I don’t appreciate you and that I’d never be able to tell you that again. But now I have and I don’t feel better because I feel guilty for making you feel guilty because of course you’d feel guilty about not being able to perform with us. And now I’m making it about me still, when it really should be about you and I don’t know how to fix that. I just... I want you to smile again.

“Don’t worry about the troupe though, we’ve all been practicing and everything. Staying in shape, staying tough. When I’m not here I’m there, just trying to make everything happen the way I think you’d want it to. I check on Liger a lot and bhe isg gdoig okaye hebs wortied abougbwi ebrue beuw efde fbuee ebauebue elei fub. Thgb ea soff fbugbgg eotutb mushfeh ebauieue wacmnkd aleoid f bue asiw aois lis due owier uer dpii...”

Words became mush in her mind, the language became unrecognizable. She felt faint, overwhelmed. Putty fell from Fritz’s mouth, deep purple globs of dough. His words were an ocean of muck and worry, permeating Annelie’s ears. She closed her eyes and felt the ocean receding. The dark purple waters drew back, leaving behind a desert. Sand and sky on all expanses. A large cube in the distance, shimmering and floating above the ground with the texture of silken robes. 

Fritz’s words were hums of foreign insects searching for flowering plants in the sand. She felt her body collapse and land in the sand, which billowed and scattered around her. The sun was lukewarm. Bird cries of misshapen vultures overhead sounded like footsteps running out of a room. The cube emerges in the distance, shimmering and effervescent. She starts moving towards it, walking past wooden ladders floating in midair. The dance of the moon and the sun overhead as the sky began to oscillate its colors. Flowers sprouted and wilted as she watched, the cube never came closer. The sound of the accordion, the strongman’s waltz. In the distance she heard her father laugh. She began to run, and the grains of sand that were kicked up sprouted fireflies with their flames eternally on. Flowering vines lifted her in the air and she felt her chest cry in pain. Her leg disappears in a burst of fire. The cube of silk took the form of a man of sand, which fades away in the breeze of the desert, scattering to darkened fireflies that fill the sky like a Pharaoh's plague. The wounds in her chest are mouths and all of them cried out in pain. They shouted and screamed like a child losing something dear.

Watery, her eyes open to the warm green glow of Cleo’s staff. She spasms and coughs. Fritz is there at her side, picking up her hand.

“Is she going to be okay?” He asks.

“She’ll be just fine,” Cleo responds. “Have you told her about the Saint Lotier thing?”

Through the haze, Annelie is confused. What Saint Lotier thing? Why is that name so familiar?

“I haven’t, she hasn’t been lucid yet, I still haven’t heard her voice. Is there any way that we can speed up her healing? Anyone who knows about this?”

“I’d ask Euden. He knows more about everyone in this castle than I ever could.” 

Annelie felt like a fly on the wall in their conversation. She was there, awake. Lucid. Try as she might, she couldn’t move her body. She was stuck in herself, underneath the water but right at the surface. The sunlight shines through but does not warm. She was sick to pieces of all the constant, excruciating pain. Why her? What did she do wrong? What was the curse brought upon her? All she wanted to do was make people smile, make them happy. She spent every waking moment making sure that she was the best ringleader in the world. Her performances were her life. What was so wrong about that?

“Do you think Sylas would know a thing or two?” Fritz asks. He squeezes her hand, and she tries her hardest to squeeze it back. How did she cough? How did she move her body? She was trying her best but all was failing. 

“Perhaps, would you like me to fetch him?” Cleo stopped healing her, which opened a flood of pain that Annelie didn’t know was being dammed up. Her eyes started to tear up. She started to lose lucidity again. Flicker, flicker. Drapery of silk and ghee wrap around her soul and bring her deeper within herself.

“Please,” Fritz said, she heard him through a long tunnel of darkness. “I need help, she needs help.”

She fell deeper below the surface, and woke up once more in the lukewarm desert with the panicking sky. What was so wrong with her that the world decided to punish her? She couldn’t stand to see Fritz so tormented. What was he tormented about...? In the distance, the shimmering silken cube rose from the ground. There was a stinging in her leg, and she looked down to watch fireflies pour out of an opening in her flesh. A familiar waltz rang in her head. The accordion... Whose accordion was it? Why did she feel like she was being punished? From the sand rose thick moss, and trees grew from leaves down. Her clothing molted into cotton robes, a brown hooded cloak. Where was she?

“Annelie,” she heard her father say. She didn’t know from where. Circus-tent-shaped mushrooms sprouted between the roots of the trees, and fireflies swarmed them all. Drums and laughter echoed through the forest. Where was the cube? Cube? Annelie knelt down and peered into a mushroom. Inside, ants performed trapeze acts, jumped beetles through hoops. The audience of gnats cheered and shouted. She peered into another one, then another and another. They all had the same scene within. Insects performing bizarre actions to the delight of other insects. Menial tasks, to jump from one centimeter to the next. To watch a beetle crawl through a hoop. There was no danger. These mushroom acts were the mushrooms themselves: substance, no roots. She felt herself cry, but there was a smile on her face. The grand hum of the mushroom tents filled her ears. 

The forest beckoned for her to go deeper, and she obliged.


End file.
